On the Conditions of Europe and Need for a New System:
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
“Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it
has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into
two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — bourgeoisie
and proletariat.”
“Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman,
in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another,
carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in
the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the
contending classes.”
“In proportion therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage
decreases.”
“And here it becomes evident that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling
class in society and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding
law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within
his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state that it has to feed
him instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie; in
other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.”
“But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the
system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on
the exploitation of the many by the few.”
“Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have
nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
What is Communism?
“Workingmen of all countries unite!”
“the theory of Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of
private property.”
“Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all
that is does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labor of others by means of
such appropriation"